Hey everyone,

I'm the founder and head mod of r/NorthFloridaSwap, a local buy/sell/trade community serving 15 counties across North Florida (Alachua, Baker, Bradford, Clay, Columbia, Duval, Flagler, Gilchrist, Levy, Marion, Nassau, Putnam, St. Johns, Suwannee, and Union).

I work 12 to 16 hour days, 6 days a week right now, and I'm realizing fast that manually assigning county flair to every new member just isn't going to be sustainable for me as basically the only active mod. I want to get the whole flair system automated so the community can run itself without me having to jump in every time someone joins.

Here's the flow I'm trying to build and I'd love input on whether this is the right approach or if there's something smarter:

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The Ideal Flow:

1. User joins r/NorthFloridaSwap
2. They get an automated welcome message (via Automod or a bot) that introduces the sub and asks them to pick their county from a list of 15
3. They reply with their county choice (a number 1-15 or the county name)
4. They automatically get the right Tier 0 flair assigned, like: Tier 0 | New Member - Duval County
5. From there, flair upgrades happen automatically based on their confirmed transactions (Tier 1 through Tier 5)

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What I've figured out so far:

• Automod can detect a first-time participant using ~flair_text (regex): ".+" and send them a DM with the county list and assign a base Tier 0 | New Member flair
• The county-specific part is where it gets tricky. I don't see a native Automod-only way to read their reply and map it to the correct county flair template ID. That part seems to need a PRAW bot
• I have some coding ability (Python/JS) and I'm comfortable building a bot if that's the right move. I'm actually waiting on Reddit API developer approval right now
• I've looked at Railway and Replit but trying to keep this free since the sub makes no money. Looking at Oracle Cloud Always Free or my existing Hostinger VPS

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Questions I have:

1. Is there a pure Automod-only way to handle county selection and flair assignment, or is a PRAW bot unavoidable for this?
2. Has anyone seen this done well on other subs? I noticed r/FragranceSwap seems to have a really polished flair system. Does anyone know how they handle new member onboarding and flair assignment?
3. Would a flair selection widget in the sidebar work better than the DM reply flow? I want people to actually use it, not ignore the message
4. Any suggestions for making the Automod welcome message feel less like spam so people actually respond?
5. Is there a way to automate flair upgrades (Tier 0 to Tier 5) based on confirmed transaction posts/comments, or does that always need to be manual?

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Our current flair structure for context:

• Tier 0 | New Member - [County] - Default for all new members
• Tier 1 | Scout - [County] - 1 to 4 confirmed transactions
• Tier 2 | Prospector - [County] - 5 to 14 confirmed transactions
• Tier 3 | Gold Merchant - [County] - 15 to 24 transactions
• Tier 4 | Diamond Elite - [County] - 25 to 50 transactions
• Tier 5 | Obsidian Legend - [County] - 50+ transactions

Each tier x 15 counties = a lot of flair templates, and I'm trying to figure out if I can get all of this running end to end without me having to touch it.

Any advice, opinions, or "here's what actually works" input is genuinely appreciated. I'm not stuck on any particular approach. If there's a better way to do this I want to hear it. Thanks in advance!

• u/HaywoodBloyme | Founder, r/NorthFloridaSwap